About

Play is an important and natural activity that young children use to learn about their worlds. Child psychology experts agree that play is important for learning, reading1, and social skills.2 The National Association for the Education of Young Children stated:

“…Play promotes key abilities that enable children to learn successfully. In high-level dramatic play … the collaborative planning of roles and scenarios and the impulse control required to stay within the play’s constraints develop children’s self-regulation, symbolic thinking, memory, and language — capacities critical to later learning, social competence, and school success.”3

Children with delays and disabilities often have delays in play. The Developmental Play Assessment-Professional (DPA-P) was created to measure how young children are developing in their play activities to help teachers and service providers to identify activities that will help children learn to play more and at more advanced levels.

The DPA-P was initially developed as a research tool and was found promising for use in identifying and working with children who have delays in play. The current project is focused on revising the instrument to be a more user friendly version to determine a child’s progress in play.

National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). (2009). Position Statement: Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8. Retrieved from http://www.naeyc.org/positionstatements/dap. ↩